Timeline for What is word order used for in "free word order" languages?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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| Aug 14, 2013 at 14:06 | history | edited | vsz | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 13, 2013 at 9:05 | comment | added | hippietrail | @vsz: Ah so not totally free word order and much the same reasoning for the constraint as in any other language. There are also languages without this constraint. | |
| Aug 13, 2013 at 6:08 | comment | added | vsz |
@hippietrail : No, they cannot be split, a means simply the, so it is an article which belongs to the noun and makes no sense without the noun.
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| Aug 13, 2013 at 3:50 | comment | added | hippietrail |
In all the permutations given I see the two word a házban always occur together in this order. Can these two also bit split and distributed arbitrarily or is this a constraint?
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| Aug 13, 2013 at 3:46 | comment | added | hippietrail | There are Australian Aboriginal languages with even freer word order than Hungarian. I believe Dyirbal is one of the most studied/well-known in this regard. No language allows utterly arbitrary arrangement of words of course. You can't mix the words from two clauses of a complex sentence for instance. | |
| Aug 13, 2013 at 3:42 | history | edited | vsz | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 13, 2013 at 3:40 | comment | added | vsz | Actually, it would be "Tom volt a házban" (voltam is first person), meaning that it's important that it's Tom who was in the house and not someone else, or that he was really in the house instead of being absent (depending on where you have the accent in speaking). Saying "Tom a házban volt." means that he was in the house and not somewhere else. | |
| Aug 12, 2013 at 20:50 | comment | added | P Elliott | I don't know about others, but i always tend to prefer a gloss for non-English examples. It doesn't matter if it's incorrect in English - that's what makes it a gloss, and not a translation. Your examples all seem consistent with the notion that the fronted constituent is focused - in other words, fronting an element sets up a contrast between that element and set of alternatives. So if we have Tom, Dick and Harry, Tom voltam a házban means Tom was in the house, but Dick and Harry weren't in the house. Is this right? | |
| Aug 12, 2013 at 19:41 | comment | added | vsz |
@PElliott : This is why I gave the translation of the 3 words separately, to see which is which. It would not make much sense to write "I in the house was." because it's incorrect in English. Note, these 6 examples can be diversified even more in speech by putting accent on the first or second word. In this case, putting an accent on the second word makes the meaning very close to the version where that word is the first in the sentence. For example, Én *voltam* a házban = I was not absent. *Én* voltam a házban = It was me! Does this answer your question?
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| Aug 12, 2013 at 19:27 | comment | added | P Elliott | Would you mind giving glosses for the Hungarian sentences rather than just loose translations? I can more or less follow what's going on, but it requires a bit of mental reconstruction. The interpretive effect in many of these examples can perhaps be explained on the basis of a well known property property of Hungarian - focused constituents are obligatorily fronted to the left-periphery, in a process similar to wh-movement. The primary reference for this is Michael Brody's work, e.g. this paper: phon.ucl.ac.uk/publications/WPL/90papers/… | |
| Aug 12, 2013 at 19:00 | history | answered | vsz | CC BY-SA 3.0 |